Undisciplinary
Undisciplinary
Embryo Adoption and the Intersection of Religion, Politics, and Reproductive Justice
** Below is AI generated**
What happens when religion, politics, and reproductive rights collide? Join us in this thought-provoking episode of Undisciplinary, featuring Risa Cromer, an Associate Professor in Anthropology at Purdue University. Risa takes us on her unique journey from a secular upbringing to studying the powerful intersections of religious politics and reproductive rights. Together, we explore the complex landscape of reproductive justice, revealing how reproductive capacities become battlegrounds for power and control.
Ever wondered what sets embryo adoption apart from sperm or embryo donation? We break down its origins, deeply rooted in American evangelism, and the political forces driving its popularity. Risa illuminates the technicalities of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the specific, often costly requirements for embryo adoption, including the crucial but under-discussed home study process. Through this lens, we also examine the commercialization and ethical issues tied to embryo adoption, highlighting the tension between its idealistic mission and the reality of "embryo shopping."
Finally, we unravel the complex ties between embryo adoption, anti-abortion politics, and Christian nationalism. By connecting the dots between the promotion of a "culture of life" and broader authoritarian agendas, we reflect on the implications in a post-Roe v Wade landscape marked by varying state-level abortion restrictions. This episode offers a deep dive into how these reproductive politics resonate with themes of racial justice, gender, and the right to know one's biological heritage, inviting listeners to critically engage with these pressing issues.
Undisciplinary - a podcast that talks across the boundaries of history, ethics, and the politics of health.
Follow us on Twitter @undisciplinary_ or email questions for "mailbag episodes" undisciplinarypod@gmail.com
Undisciplinary is recorded on the unceded lands of the Wadawurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation in Geelong and the Gadigal peoples of the Eora Nation in Sydney. We pay our respects to Elders, past and present.
Speaker 2:The world's first high-strung plant has been performed. Medical history has been made in.
Speaker 1:South Africa.
Speaker 3:Reports of systemic racism in the healthcare system, and COVID-19 has made the issue even more urgent. It can be characterized as a pandemic.
Speaker 1:Welcome to Undisciplinary, a podcast where we're talking across the boundaries of history, ethics and the politics of health, co-hosted by Chris Mays and Jane Williams Jane Williams, so welcome to another episode of Undisciplinary Jane.
Speaker 2:How are you going Very well. Thank you, chris. Delightful to be back in the Undisciplinary chair.
Speaker 1:Excellent, yes, and it's nice this time we also have a guest, so we're not just relying on our own thoughts or ideas. Also, I'm ambitious in trying to get this out soon after the recording. So this is, I guess, a final plea, or shout out the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy abstracts are due on the 30th of July and one of the keynotes, kamisha Russell, will be talking about some themes that we'll be having discussing today, and also she was, I believe, the third guest we ever had on Undisciplinary Courtney and I interviewed her. So go back and listen to that and put an abstract Russian abstract in for the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy, because Kamisha will be talking about things to do with reproductive justice, racial justice and so on. Jane, do you have any announcements?
Speaker 2:Nothing to spruik, not today.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, so I guess, as related to Kamisha and reproductive justice, our guest today, who we'll introduce formally in a moment I heard Risa Cromer give a really interesting paper for the Deakin Anthropology Seminar Series on some things to do with reproductive justice and also its interconnection with religion, and the Christian right, I guess, and evangelical movements in the US. So, jane, would you like to introduce?
Speaker 2:I'm really excited to introduce Risa. I've had a lot of fun reading her work over the last few days. So Risa Cromer is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at Purdue University. She's a cultural anthropologist, educator and advocate for justice. She specializes in reproductive politics that animate medicine, science and technology. Her research areas span the reproductive health spectrum, including abortion, assisted reproduction, infertility, menstruation and pregnancy. Her scholarship showcases the relevance of feminist approaches in anthropology to political activities of global consequence, from the changing landscape for reproductive rights to the rising prominence of right-wing movements worldwide. Her book Conceiving Christian America, embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics was published in 2023 by NYU Press. Welcome Risa.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Such a pleasure to be in conversation with you two.
Speaker 1:Yes, thanks a lot for agreeing to come on and something that, yeah, in reading your work it was really fascinating to hear about the different methodologies and approaches that you take and we'll get into that, but I guess it would be.
Speaker 1:You know, something that we always like to ask the guests is sort of how they came to be doing the kind of work that you are doing, because it does sort of intersect with a lot of different disciplines and perspectives. So it'd be interesting to hear your story as to sort of how you got into this sort of current area of research.
Speaker 3:Sure, thanks for that question. It's a very anthropological question with a sort of like tell me about yourself, so let me give this a shot. A couple of things to know about me. This is a bit of a feminist practice. It's just some of my identity.
Speaker 3:So I identify as a queer, white, cis woman who currently resides on the occupied lands of the Miami and Kickapoo peoples in a place called Indianapolis, indiana in the United States, and my work generally focuses on reproductive politics. It's really long attracted my attention, both as an advocate for reproductive rights and justice, in my professional role as a teacher and researcher in cultural anthropology and feminist social science, and also as a creative person who likes to create art at these intersections. So I came to the work that I've been doing sometime long ago. So I study religious politics that intersect with reproductive politics. My family of origin does not affiliate with any religious tradition, but I did get a religious education in Catholic schooling and this might surprise me and it might surprise others, but it was also where I first learned about feminism. I think I got part of that radical kind of Catholic worker liberation pedagogy education and I took some of those early lessons that directed me towards social justice generally to college, where some of my ambitions to study math veered after taking my first gender studies course, and gender studies would become my eventual major and a launchpad for community organizing work that I sought to do after college in the realm of reproductive politics. I worked in conservative counties in the Pacific Northwest organizing around abortion rights and eventually that work launched me into graduate studies in cultural anthropology with a focus on that. Work launched me into graduate studies in cultural anthropology with a focus on women's and gender studies as well.
Speaker 3:During my training in cultural anthropology I was able to do some pre-doc work to work while I was writing up my dissertation as a health services researcher in the veteran affairs health system and then, right after I finished my degree, I did a postdoc in bioethics.
Speaker 3:So I've had the chance to work in healthcare settings as well as do research in spaces that provide healthcare and then do advocacy work on and around health related politics. And all of these help tell the story of why I have put reproductive politics at the center of my work on all these fronts. So reproductive politics might be helpful to explain what I mean by that. I think of it as the places and the moments where our bodies and their varying social meanings become politicized, and particularly the reproductive capacities and potentials of our bodies. There's nothing intrinsically political about reproduction, but it has become and for many times and places throughout history has been a common site of power relations, even though the centrality and often utility of reproductive processes for seizing and sustaining power are often obscured. And so my research interests in reproductive politics align with feminist scholars and activists who have focused on understanding sort of the where, how and why reproduction becomes politicized and with what effects production becomes politicized and with what effects.
Speaker 3:So I focus my attention on reproductive politics in the United States, and doing so, I've learned, has been impossible to do without thinking about two other R's as inextricable in the making of reproduction as a political site of activity, and those two other R's are religion and race and racism. So I came to graduate school motivated to focus on abortion politics in particular. The story of abortion politics in the US context has a distinctive quality and tone. It's a really common facet of life that has a lot of stigma around it social stigma and it's underrepresented in anthropological research. That's not true for some of the other social sciences, but there is a lack of ethnographic attention on it. And so I decided, through courses and exploration, to explore abortion politics through what might seem like a distant realm, which is the realm of assisted reproduction, and more specifically through a topic that was brewing at the turn of the 21st century, which is the ethical, legal and social questions brewing about what to do with the hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos made through in vitro fertilization and stored in cryopreservation tanks across the nation's 500 or so fertility clinics. So I first encountered the figure of the frozen embryo in reading about lawsuits among divorcing couples from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, who could not decide what to do with their remaining embryos, and so they brought the question to court and asked judges to clarify are these personal property, are they persons, or are they some combination or something else? And so these court cases were taking place in the decades that were governed by a Supreme Court ruling Roe v Wade, which was decided on 1973 and extended federal protections for legal rights to abortion, which were also decades when the anti-abortion movement mounted its efforts to erode and undermine rights to abortion using a variety of strategies. But one of the strategies of importance to our discussion today is treating fetuses in utero as legal persons, so trying to redefine the definition of personhood to include fetuses in utero. That was all happening at the same time that courts were considering if frozen embryos ought to be treated as personal property or persons.
Speaker 3:And as I dug further, I discovered that the reason such cases around frozen embryos were being decided in court was because there were no laws that existed that defined the legal status of embryos or fetuses. So while anti-Abortion Act advocates were trying to establish a legal definition for fetuses as persons, I was wondering what would it mean if the status of frozen embryos were to become codified in law? And, more specifically, what if they were legally redefined as persons? So these kind of blunt legal categories that were ill-fitted for answering the question of what frozen embryos are and how ought to they be treated, that were being volleyed around in divorce court, could have massive social consequences, not just for a couple's you know joint set of IVF embryos or IVF embryos more generally, but also for established pregnancies.
Speaker 3:So in other words, the social, ethical, legal status of frozen embryos struck me as a really important site of political activity with major implications for abortion rights and the whole suite of sexual and reproductive health rights and justice, even if those connections between abortion politics and the realm of assisted reproduction and the myriad consequences that might arise because of their intersections were not yet being made explicit and were not yet being discussed among the heaps of scholarship on the embryo wars and frozen embryo politics being generated by bioethicists, theologians, legal scholars, clinicians and the like.
Speaker 3:So a big goal of my work in bringing curiosity about what shape and form abortion politics might be taking in unexpected places is to make clear that the practice of embryo adoption is directly related to abortion politics, even though it does not directly intersect with abortion care. So another goal of my work is to try to encourage more constellational thinking, by which I mean to see and to make connections across reproductive politics more explicit, to recognize that miscarriage management and the hyper-surveillance of pregnant people and their pregnancy outcomes is also directly connected to abortion rights, is also directly connected to people who wish to be pregnant and are struggling with infertility. So my hope is that learning a bit about the playbook that engages reproductive politics in strategic, though sometimes surprising, ways, particularly for regress events, can be instructive for folks who have visions, like I do, to realize, to conceive of futures in which reproductive freedom could be more accessible and established for all. So these are the kinds of questions and investments that have propelled my personal, creative and professional interests over the last almost 20 years.
Speaker 1:Wow, thank you for that. That's, you know a lot to process and to discuss, which is very exciting.
Speaker 2:And I guess.
Speaker 1:I'd like to go just briefly back to the very sort of not the very beginning, but you mentioned about Catholic schooling and you know, as you know, that doesn't surprise me in terms of the sort of feminist tradition and the Catholic social worker movement and that sort of radical politics. And also, you know, others have talked about the entanglement with STS scholarship and certain strands within Catholicism and people like Bruno Latour and Ivan Illich and these sorts of traditions. So that was interesting to hear and I guess part of the thing that fascinates me with your work is, I guess somewhat egotistically, in that it sort of overlaps with some of my own interests but then also, I guess, in you know, my own, my own, I guess, intellectual journey and biography, in that I was and am part of, I guess, different religious communities, that in Australia I'd say that the US evangelical communities are sort of the bizarro cousins, that there is some kind of relationship, and so a lot of the politics that I read about in my own work and also reading your work have strange echoes to some of the things that I grew up hearing and certainly grew up seeing around, things whether about explicitly things like abortion or reproductive politics, but then also, yeah, intersecting with adoption and those kinds of debates and then also just going into, I guess, when I started my PhD here in Australia, we had the Lockhart Review, which was about what should be done with. It was about embryo research, but again with this big politicisation and question around all of these thousands of frozen embryos, or millions of frozen embryos, and particularly the US politics shaping a lot of that. But then when I went in to do my PhD at the Centre for Values, ethics and Law and Medicine, ian Kerridge, who was the director and a mentor of mine, he was involved in this Lockhart review and coming at it from almost a polar opposite to some of the communities that I was hearing talking about in a very sort of polemic way. So yeah, for me this is a fascinating area that I sort of have been an observer and a researcher in different ways.
Speaker 1:But people aren't here to hear about me.
Speaker 1:We want to hear more about your work. So you talk about a lot of this in your new book Conceiving Christian America Embryo, adoption and Reproductive Politics America embryo, adoption and reproductive politics and I must say so, as I mentioned earlier, I came across you and your work in the anthropology seminar that you gave and I immediately ordered your book, and I ordered it through Booktopia, which is a company that has since gone into insolvency, and now I did a big book order and I haven't got the book yet and it's still, I think, the lawyers are sorting out whether they are going to honour their contract. So I have been reading your articles and hopefully that will suffice to have this conversation. But I guess one of the things that would be interesting and you've mentioned embryo adoption, and I guess on face value that may be quite straightforward, but it would be good, particularly for listeners who may be unfamiliar with these areas, to just unpack what that means. And how does that differ perhaps from more familiar practices like sperm donation or egg or embryo donation?
Speaker 3:That's a great question, it might seem, it might sound like it makes sense and it requires. I mean, a big part of the project is to interrogate the rhetorical work of putting together two words that scream politics, they it screams intention and it is absolutely intended to have an effect. So let me offer some advantages I gathered from doing research with proponents who are professional workers for these programs, as well as participants, either donors or recipients. So embryo adoption is a family-making practice that uses third-party assisted reproduction technologies that was established by white pro-life evangelicals 25 years ago in the United States. So I'll unpack a bit of that.
Speaker 3:In vitro fertilization is a form of assisted reproduction that makes human embryos in vitro or in petri dishes for their use by progenitors for procreative purposes. And, in the US context, unused IVF embryos the ones that are made in excess of use at that time are typically frozen for potential future use. But sometimes people finish their IVF efforts before using all of their embryos, at which point they typically have four options they can discard, they can donate to scientific research, they can donate to others for procreation or they can keep them frozen indefinitely. So embryo adoption describes what is a process that facilitates the procreative donation of unused IVF embryos, the procreative donation of unused IVF embryos. But it's a distinct form of embryo donation that is modeled on Christian American adoption practices to recipients who plan to gestate and parent any children born from the practice. So embryo adoption shares a lot of features of what is more commonly known in practice as embryo donation, which is a much older practice of sharing reproductive materials like eggs, like sperm, as a form of third-party reproduction, but it differs in a really important way. So it wields what is unequivocally anti-abortion rhetoric and the requirements that are common to Christian adoption to fulfill the mission of embryo adoption, which is, to quote, save frozen embryos and to give them a chance at realizing God's plan for them by being put within a warm uterus for a chance at birth.
Speaker 3:So embryo adoption, just to be super clear, is a very small part of the US fertility services, which is a robust, multi-million dollar industry. But the reason it's worth looking at, I suggest, is because it's played a disproportionate and outsized role in conservative politics since the late 1990s. It has been enrolled within very high profile battles over public funding, investment within human embryonic stem cell research, to the most recent, most recently, an over-terminating federally protected abortion rights in the Dobbs ruling in June 2020. So it is one of a suite of options that people who are seeking fertility services have. In the US context, it's often advertised by its professional proponents as cheaper than a round of IVF, which it is, and especially IVF that requires sperm donation, egg donation or surrogacy. There are costs associated with it, because it's modeled on adoption, that are atypical when compared to embryo donation. So people who wish to receive embryos through embryo adoption partake in what is called a home study, which is very standard screening process and education process for families who wish to legally adopt children and assume parental responsibilities for them.
Speaker 3:These programs require potential recipients of frozen embryos to also incur the cost and time that's required to go through a home study, even though no child is guaranteed to be born and even though these are not legal adoptions.
Speaker 3:In fact, even though they're called embryo adoption, they are legal transfers of property.
Speaker 3:This is because there is no statutory definition of embryos as persons.
Speaker 3:By default, they have been treated as human tissue according to the Food and Drug Administration, which is the overseeing federal agency that regulates management of human tissue of various kinds for research and clinical purposes, and human tissue is typically treated as a form of property. So, because there's no designation of them as legal persons, they cannot be legally adopted, and so, when embryos are transferred between donating and receiving clients, what they're actually signing is a transfer of property contract. That contract, though, mirrors the language and the spirit of what is more recognizable in the context of adoption, so the parties involved in the legal transfer of property are called the genetic parents, the recipients are called the adoptive parents, and the embryo the frozen embryo is defined as an unborn child, and the parental rights and responsibilities are being amplified as being both present for the genetic quote parents and the adoptive quote parents, even though there is no legal child that we're talking about yet. So those are some of the key features that makes every adoption distinctive from your more average range of options in the context of assisted infection.
Speaker 2:Can I ask a question about that? It's so interesting, hey, like, is it so? So the point then, might we argue, of embryo adoption is really that it's making a political statement, I suppose, about the activity, like if it's the same as embryo donation, except for that, you presumably want to have a home study, like a I'm sorry you didn't call it, did you call it a home study, whatever? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and to go through that sort of adoption-like framework. So is that done, do you think, for for some sort of political ends?
Speaker 3:yes, and I I think that is based on sort of like my analytic takeaway of what is the thrust and point of a family making practice named this way, involving these practices, but also in listening to people who created the programs, promote the movement and participate. It is absolutely about politics, but that might. That is not exactly what folks voiced to me. They would say things more like, of course, what we call things matters. It matters that we give value to embryos by recognizing that they're like orphaned children. They don't have parents, they don't have homes and they are deserving of both. We liken them to born children and children in orphanages that are deserving of the same thing. In God's eyes they are equivalent. We are not willing to distinguish between a child in an orphanage, a child with a parent ready to relinquish, or a frozen embryo in a cryopreservation tank. Also, you know, what we call things matters is pointing us explicitly to the rhetorical intention of conjoining the words embryo and adoption. Even if it's not descriptive of the practice legally, it is descriptive of the spirit that is brought to the practice, and donors and recipients tend to share that spirit of giving and receiving something that's regarded as special and deserving of ritual. That is above and beyond and I'm going to paraphrase some of their language here the cold treatment that is perceived within in vitro fertilization. So, while majority white evangelical Christians are participating in the donation and the receipt of embryos through this practice, there is a squeamishness with in vitro fertilization more generally and third-party reproduction specifically. So egg donation and sperm donation are typically not options for these couples, their couples in terms of creating their family.
Speaker 3:And embryo donation does appeal for a variety of reasons. One, because it creates a kind of balance between the procreative party, sort of the future intended parents to a child born from embryo adoption would share, and, not having a genetic link to any child, there's the, so there's a sameness, sort of like a sharing of a genetic difference, and frankly that's very consistent with adoption. We'll call it just traditional adoption or conventional adoption. Another key appeal of embryo adoption is that it aligns with religious identities and orientations that are have been linked to predominantly, though not exclusively, to pro-life politics. This idea that God recognizes in each of us when we're quote being knitted in our mother's wombs, a likeness, and that informs a number of pro-life evangelicals' ideas about why they're anti-abortion, why they identify as pro-life, so it ticks the box of this aligns with our relationship with God. This aligns with being good stewards of God's children and resources. This aligns with our political orientations.
Speaker 3:It also is it ticks one other box, which is it allows conservative religious people who are squeamish or might have ethical or social pressure against participation in assisted reproduction a pathway to access that form of family making assistance.
Speaker 3:It's a way to experience pregnancy which is appealing to some people who experience infertility or not able to use their own gametes to help become pregnant. It allows them to participate in adoption, which has become a sort of promoted popular Christian act within the last 20 or so years. More so, it's been sort of a part of Christian practice for 70 plus years in the US context, but more embraced in recent decades. So it allows a lot of optionality and I think of the people who come to Embryo Donation, particularly the recipients, as savvy consumers. I think of the people who come to embryo donation, particularly recipients, as savvy consumers. I think they're aware that this is affirming a project of helping realize god's vision for each and every human embryo that they regard as an unborn child and that deserves a chance to be born, by welcoming them into their uterus and giving them that chance, even if god decides ultimately that they are not to be born into their family so like a savior thing, hey, oh, sorry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you go, chris I know what were you gonna say, jane well, I was just, I was thinking that all of those things, so, as a person without any religion in my life, um, ever really and quite clueless, um, to me that points to the idea of sort of christian saviors, right, so where does, where does the idea of a savior come in? So you were saying that about being, you know it being God's will, I guess, or design that these embryos get born, and so on. But does it not also say something about the goodness, I suppose, of the adoptive?
Speaker 1:I suppose of the adoptive parent, if you like, Before we say yeah, because I think the saviour thing is going to open up into a whole new area which will be good to talk about. I just wanted to question whether it ticks another box as well. Um, and this comes to where the embryos are coming from. So from, like christian ethics about, uh, with christian couples going into ivf, the, you know, some of the evangelical ethics permits it, I mean. So this whole area is quite interesting in comparison, I mean in terms of theology, in comparison, say, catholics traditionally have a bit more of a harder line over engaging with these technologies, whereas from my reading you know, the Protestant evangelicals have had, at least in Australia, a bit more flexibility and in Britain than in, say, the US, but there's still been some.
Speaker 1:Under some conditions, couples who can't conceive can use these technologies, and one of the conditions, at least you know, in the theological ethicists I've read, is that all embryos are used and given that chance, and so this idea that you're not going to just produce 10 embryos and then leave, and then you're faced with this moral and, I guess, theological dilemma of what to do with them, and it seems that this can provide a way out for, say, christian couples who subscribe to that ethics have got a number of embryos frozen, don't know what to do with them, but now they can put them through this program. And I'm just curious to know if that at all plays out in the reasonings why people would donate their embryos to these services.
Speaker 3:Yeah, your intuition's spot on, Chris. Donors are a slightly different share, a slightly different one, more demographic diversity than the recipients, but also a different diversity of perspective and opinion on sort of ticking those boxes. Not all donors are explicitly motivated by what we might call religious politics or being good stewards of God resources, though it was a pretty common remark, which is we feel ethically burdened by having participated in a process that addressed a problem but create a new kind of problem. And even for the some of the donors who were not interested squarely sort of that typified way of like a pro-life white evangelical, who are like these are our ethical, these are our children who need to find homes ASAP, who had more diverse political orientations. Even some folks who identified as pro-choice, for instance, were like yeah, but also I created these with an intention and it took a lot of time and money and emotional effort and even physical labor and my body can't receive them and I can't actually give them a chance. And even though that might not be a political motivation, I still feel good about being able to donate to give that a pathway. It's a sort of resolution for an ethical conundrum that IVF patients sometimes experience at the end of IVF and that is not unique to religious conservatives. This is a very common and relatable circumstance that many IVF patients experience.
Speaker 3:Often, those four options of discard, donate to science, donate for procreative purposes through embryo donation, which is typically anonymous, so you don't get to know the outcome, you don't get to know anything about any offspring that would be born, etc or not, or to keep frozen indefinitely are not satisfying to all fertility patients of any religious or political persuasion.
Speaker 3:And so I hear in some of the proponents who said who, who explain embryo adoption as a response to people's dissatisfaction with a limited range of solutions for what are well-recognized as conundrums for fertility patients and they offer embryo adoption as a solution that's going to, you know, meet the needs of some people and, in their political imaginary, be the best option for all.
Speaker 3:We hear this in. The Southern Baptist Convention took a position on IVF recently it's the largest congregation of evangelicals in the US context took a position on in vitro fertilization this summer in Indianapolis where I live. That is critical of IVF. That encourages people to only create the number of embryos they're willing to put into the uterus at that time, so essentially to take cryopreservation out of the equation and really promoted embryo adoption as a solution for the surplus embryos that are, you know in their language, kind of languishing in cryopreservation or limbo. A number you know a not insignificant number of whom were Catholic who participate in IVF, came to embryo adoption as a as definitely a kind of, I believe, a solution for what felt like probably an ethical or religious tough spot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, another maybe not. I mean, I think it could be a straightforward question, but uh, unlikely. But um, you know, christianity and capitalism are two beautiful things that the us has uh joined nicely together. Um, to what extent is money a big feature in these clinics and services?
Speaker 3:Thanks for that question. You know, if we were to ask the professionals who helped establish these programs and promote them, they're emphasizing changing hearts and minds. They wish to revalue life through the practice of embryo adoption, to expand the vision for God has for Christian America and, much more ambitiously, to really yoke the project of, you know, embryo adoption, a teeny little project, to the broader ambitions of the Christian right and, more generally, white Christian nationalist ambitions to realize God's kingdom. Here in the United States. That's what they would say and did say. Not so often are discussions of money being talked about. In fact, the marketization of embryos within embryo adoption is not talked about because it's unsatisfying. In fact, what embryo adoption is wishing to do is to essentially decommodify, to rehumanize embryos, to counteract the commercialization of human life and the devaluation of it through the sort of like amassment of human embryos, this creation of surplus, through very standard practices in IVF in the United States and elsewhere. So they have an anti-commodity approach. Standard practices in IVF in the United States and elsewhere, so they have an anti-commodity approach. Also, embryo adoption is, by design, a marketplace that involves donors and recipients exchanging embryos via ranking systems that help advantage some embryos from some donors over others and then efforts to then try to mark and market embryos that aren't moving very well through the adoption process happens. This is very consistent with what happens in third-party reproduction. It's very consistent with what happens in adoption, in adoption.
Speaker 3:Embryo adoption is not unique in this. It is not a gotcha finding. It is an exemplar of what is happening in family-making practices and also family-unmaking practices in assisted reproduction and adoption. It just sort of amplifies exactly what's happening there, even though in mission they're trying to promote an anti-commodifying approach. So this leads to practices from recipients that I describe in the book as embryo shopping. It's actually what some of the professionals who help facilitate matches between donors and recipients lament is what's happening among some of their recipient clients who are very picky, who realize they had a selective advantage to be able, because there are more donors than they were recipients, so they could say no, I don't like those or I actually don't want babies born from. You know, with red hair, that guy looks a lot like my high school boyfriend. I couldn't possibly accept embryos from him. The selectivity would bristle. The professionals would bristle at some of the selectivity that they noticed among their clients. They wished that they would be more like the clients from the old days the late 90s, early 2000s who recognized the mission, who would come in and say we're here to give embryos a home and a chance, not trying to just create the perfect family via their own vision. So this is well known. That kind of commercialization and monetization of this practice is a big part of what's going on, but in terms of real dollars and cents.
Speaker 3:Embryo adoption has been financed by the public by taxpayers that's the word I'm looking for in the United States since 2002. So multiple millions of dollars have been allocated to embryo adoption and donation advocacy, awareness. It was a bipartisan fund that was established in 2002 under former president George W Bush as a way to complement what was also going on with human embryonic stem cell research. They're like what if we did a both and? Well, if we can, like, promote human embryonic stem cell research, kind of, but also obstruct it, but let's do this other thing of being like, if people wish to donate or receive embryos this way that they learn about it through public education. So millions of dollars since 2002 have been granted to recipient agencies.
Speaker 3:So a number of the eight current embryo adoption programs in the United States have been recipients of millions of taxpayer dollars.
Speaker 3:Also, that money has helped those same programs weather some financial storms over the years.
Speaker 3:So adoption agencies especially through the Great Recession, so 2008, 2009, 2010, struggled to stay open because of costs associated with domestic and international adoptions. People weren't expanding their families, people weren't incurring personal costs to do so via adoption, and so a number of adoption agencies had to shutter or close or merge. Christian adoption agencies with embryo adoption programs are actually able to not just stay solvent, but they're able to float and maintain their other programs, as well as to expand and acquire other adoption agencies. So, by many measures, embryo adoption is good business in the realm of adoption practice. It kind of helps domestic and international adoption programs stay going. That doesn't mean, though, that it's been fully embraced by the adoption world. It's not only seen as a competitor, but for some who have a heart for orphans which is a common language, but either in orphanages around the world or children to be placed by birth parents in the US context domestically they don't see the equivalence between embryos and born children, and there is friction within the Christian adoption world around this issue.
Speaker 1:I was curious to know whether they facilitate, I guess, two things. One, how Christian do you have to be to adopt like'm a Christian, or is there some actual church attendance or that kind of practice? And then also, is there any kind of facilitating of future relationship between the child and the genetic parents? Or that kind of interaction.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So donors and recipients prospective donors and recipients fill out fairly detailed applications in which they include information about themselves as well as they rank preferences for those to receive their affiliations, as well as ranking of preferences for kinds of matches they would want. So, religion on the? Let me think the recipient, let me think about this. Donors rank recipients on a list of 10. And religion they could put you know one through 10, what is it going to be? Marital status, religion, religiosity, education, a number of things beyond here. Religion is really often ranked high.
Speaker 3:It is not an undesirable reason why people came to the program. So a number of the programs have a Christian affiliation explicitly and that is attracting some people to them and so they're like the Christian in the name, for example, of Nightlight. Christian Adoptions started the first embryo adoption program in the United States called the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption. Well, people are attracted to Nightlight for all their programs, typically because there's the Christian in the name. They know they're getting a particular kind of service, a value that comes with it, et cetera. So being asked explicitly about religiosity and desires and preferences for the sort of affiliations, level of practice, et cetera from others suggests it's pretty important. They also ask about racial identities and matching preferences for race. That too suggests a relevance of importance. It's not an open-ended survey for matching. They preset these categories and match accordingly. So I think of those as structuring the conditions for possibility for the kinds of matches possible there's no, Just jump in with a follow-up there, Risa.
Speaker 2:So I really I noticed in one of your papers that the donors had expressed a preference, say, for the embryo to be born into a family with the same racial makeup as the people who conceived the embryo. Do they get like a power of veto as well, or do they just get like this is my preference?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it depends on the different kinds of programs, and the one I spent time in wish to treat the donors a lot like birth parents which, in the adoption world, have decisional authority about placement.
Speaker 3:So, unlike a context in which a child is relinquished from their parents, a birth parent would have or even a child in an orphanage, in a foreign context, where the parents have either unknowingly relinquished their parental rights or knowingly, in the context of domestic adoption, the birth parents typically are allowed to decide, and so they've maintained that same model which allows donors to decide yes, I'm willing to match, or not. So they the practice would go they would show the donors, the potential recipients, and let them say yes or no, and then, if they said yes, they would show it to the recipients Do you want these embryos, yes or no? I didn't always work out that way. Not every program has the same matching practice, but that's the spirit of it, which is that these are the donors' embryos and they kind of get to decide where they get placed. And, chris, I'm not recalling your second question.
Speaker 2:I think it was about so I was interested in this as well whether or not there's relationship, or the opportunity for a relationship, between the conceivers and the adopters.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know, I guess, just expand on, because I know that in at the end of your paper I think our family picture is a little hint of heaven. I'll provide a link to that. You sort of talk about some future research and I think the sort of relate how these children born into these families with such I would say you know such this sort of how these children born into these families with such, I would say you know, such this sort of theological burden on them of you know, fulfilling certain needs is also the sort of providence of God over them.
Speaker 3:It's more similar to children who are adopted or if there's some similarities as well to children conceived via embryo donation, where there are different laws as well, I guess, about privacy and who can know what, about the donor, etc. Et cetera. Great question. So it elicits two thoughts. So first, contact, level of contact interest is one of the matching criteria that the professionals are trying to seek alignment around. So if folks come to embryo adoption wanting what's called a closed donation, it's kind of poo-pooed in the open adoption sphere it's like that's a closed record approach we don't want to drop. This is a language from one of the program directors. Part of the reason people are disinterested in embryo donation through clinics that are typically require anonymity is because they're quote, dropping their baby in a black hole and what they want to offer is the opportunity for contact and connection. There's a whole range of ways openness could take shape, such as being able to see photos and learn some identifying information about the recipients, to know about the outcome of the frozen embryo transfers whether or not a child was born, for instance. Whether or not a child was born, for instance and then to get perhaps annual updates, birthdays and be able to learn around Christmas, meeting up for family vacations and having a much more explicit form of kinship that might model something like a cousin on a relationship between what are typically full genetic siblings from the donor family and recipient family. But so that's a matching preference that plays out in terms of who's going to work out well here. Contact's a big one and it can change. It's not a very fixed preference. Some donors are like we don't need to know. This is really stressful, we'll find, we'll be good not knowing. And then, oh, a baby was born. How are they? What do they look like? Are they doing okay, you know, very understandable, or like having a very open relationship and then being like I'm noticing that I have difficulty receiving good news about a child that looks like my, my children being raised in another family, like I thought this was a good move and I'm finding out after the fact, like this is really painful. So I mean, yeah, so it's a real dynamic living thing for the children and you know you raise this, chris. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3:I do have questions and curiosities about the oldest child born from embryo. Oldest child born from embryo. The first embryo adoption practice was born to Marlene and John Striege, who've been very prominent political proponents of embryo adoption and embryo saviorism. More generally, she's about 25. She was born in 1998. And so she just graduated social work school. She's interested in particularly pursuing the pro-life agenda and advancing the personhood of frozen embryos in her work as a professional.
Speaker 3:Not all children are prominent vocal public figures from embryo adoption and I imagine you know, just having learned about some of these families and some of the ways that their matches went, or even just having learned about some of the concerns they had over the years. Being like gosh, you know the donors. It didn't feel good to hear from the recipients that they called them rescued, like I gave you my embryos, that that was a huge gift. Why are you calling them rescued? Yeah, a very understandable and relatable sentiment.
Speaker 3:Donors are the bread and butter of the whole project. If they were not willing to give their reproductive materials, this would not work. Also, recipients with uteruses all the people I talk to identify as women. But recipients with uteruses also make the whole project go. If they were not willing to bear the reproductive risk of not becoming pregnant, of whatever might happen, this saving agenda would not be possible. And both of those groups are more systematically diminished in terms of who's doing the work and labor, who's bearing the risk and responsibility and who's even in the picture is valuable. The donors get backgrounded, the embryo gets hypervalorized. Um, the embryo gets hyper value, uh valorized, and the women who receive embryos into the uteruses fairly, fairly, systematically, um erase and efface their own active role in realizing the possibility for god's plan ie if those children are to be born the, that language of rescue.
Speaker 1:And this is, yeah, I guess, back to my question about the people who are donating and their own convictions in being donors. And it does seem that there's a kind of I don't know bait and switch going on in that these embryos, yeah, are being intentionally donated by people for a range of motivations. But then, yeah, this language of rescue also harkens back to, I guess, a sort of a much longer narrative within the Christian sort of early Christianity, the idea of sort of rescuing exposed children from the mountainside, which I think plays into a lot of abortion politics and comes in again into the sort of frozen embryo politics as well, that sense that the Greeks and the Romans would expose their infants but the Christians would come and save them and collect them. So I guess this may be because there's so many, we don't have much more time and there's so many huge topics that would be great to discuss. So, white saviourism Jane, you sort of alluded to this before Risa.
Speaker 1:I wonder if you can talk about how white saviourism plays here, in particular, I guess the whiteness in relation to race, and you were talking about the sort of new group of recipients coming through and sort of, I guess, having power in selection and the type of embryos they're wanting to select. And in your book and your articles that we've been reading, race is one of the things that people are selecting for, which sort of seems to be quite so uh, in our uh. In the earlier conversation with kamisha she was talking about how there was a sort of paranoia with some of these different fertility clinics about, um, ensuring a racial match and that they would sort of counsel against people who were open to having sort of a different raced child or what have you. Yeah, so, but here in your research there are couples that are explicitly trying to choose. I think the quote was from this Caucasian, self-identifying Caucasian couple saying that they wanted anything other than fully Caucasian embryos or children.
Speaker 3:Mm-hmm. So saviorism is? This is the anthropological find here. So why bring ethnography to looking at frozen embryo politics? We had theologians, we had biologists, we had legal scholars. What does a social scientist, particularly a feminist social scientist, bring here? I'll call it the constitutive glue of the practice that borrowed from as you're right to note, chris very old, unoriginal narratives that do a variety of particular things.
Speaker 3:Saviorism is not unique to embryo adoption, it's not unique to this moment in time. But saviorism more generally is a very persuasive and pervasive discourse that's used in a lot of political projects to try to mobilize. It does so by creating a few kinds of discrete subjects. So those that require saving, the savable valued vulnerable, those that do the act of saving, the saviors, the do-gooders, the ones on the side of the righteous moral order, and the savable are cast as deserving of protection and the saviors are justified in doing the saving. The sort of oftentimes other co-created subject here is the figure of threat, whether that's the environment, the context, the policy, the practice. So there's something threatening and it justifies moral action. White saviorism is a particular strand or sort of flavor of saviorism that enfolds racialized paternalism in it in really insidious ways. So we find a form of thinking with reproductive politics in the US context I say I can't think about it without thinking about religion and race and racism. So white saviorism is a entry point into understanding what makes compelling some of these orientations within contemporary reproductive politics around that yokes white supremacy and the hypervaluation of whiteness, and religious discourses of salvation and charity, christian discourses of salvation and charity, around this idea of do-gooding to protect a figure construed as a valued vulnerable, construed as a valued vulnerable.
Speaker 3:Frozen embers are not the first figure. The fetus at risk of abortion is one that emerged in the 1970s and has sort of been a prominent political figure the last 50 years. In the US context the orphan child and particular kinds of orphaned children have been cast as that figure. Race has played, the constructs of race have played an active role in cultivating the idea of innocence and protectability. In the US context that often falls around that racialized line of whiteness and blackness, and so anti-black racism is elemental in making possible the figure of the innocent, which is typically a whitened figure.
Speaker 3:So embryos get caught up in this, not only kind of politically or figuratively but in practice. So you reference the story of participants in embryo adoption, white missionaries who are interested in realizing a vision for God's family. God's sort of like face of heaven is multiracial, and so that can drive and propel some evangelical Christians to do what's not actually very common in the context of assisted reproduction, which is to racially quote mismatch or to seek sperm, eggs or embryos from donors who might not have alignment with your perceived or actual racialized identity, and so that racial mismatch, called transracial matching, is more consistent with international and transracial adoption as a practice of convention that promotes the adoption of children of color by white Christian families as a form of saviorism, so saving them from I mean there's very implied and sometimes very explicit overtones here to save them from a sort of unchristian world by converting them into their own family as adopted children and converting them to their faith tradition. Perhaps it's a form of conversion from poverty or perceived poverty, of a religious education or financial means or cross-cultural difference that is devalued by US American Christians.
Speaker 3:So those kinds of tropes and trends are parlaying in the practice of member adoption and finding what I think of as like both interesting and odd expression, and I think that's what has made one embryo adoption for me an interesting ethnographic site, because it is showing very starkly how the realm of assisted reproduction and conventional, traditional adoption are not distinct sites, that there is so much crossover and the connective tissue between them is more prominent than perhaps folks might wish to acknowledge or address, which helps, I think, promote advocacy, work and allyship between, let's say, donor-conceived children, birth parents who have critiques of the adoption industry as well, together to say, like how have reproductive injustices been constitutive of our lives as well, in terms of right to know, right to sort of about one's biological heritage, or rights to not feel pressure to relinquish rights to one's children or not have access to knowing about one's offspring?
Speaker 3:One of your questions Chris and I thought about before we got together was this question of right to know like. Where have I fallen on this? Like I've learned quite a bit from donor-conceived youth and who are adults as well as adult adoptees on this issue, it's really painful to not have access to answers about one's own inheritance of various kinds, and so I'm a proponent of listening to and learning from people who have that kind of experiential knowledge and when adult adoptees have been successful at opening up records so that people can get answers, this is not something the assisted reproduction realm has yet picked up systematically where anonymity is more the status quo when it comes to egg, sperm and embryo donation.
Speaker 3:This is where embryo adoption is trying to respond by facilitating open relationships, and I think ought to be affirmed in that role.
Speaker 3:Of course, my main critique of embryo adoption is not of that. My main critique is the politicization of embryos as persons that have massive stakes far beyond assisted reproduction and abortion, and so that is where I wish to draw ethnographic attention both to the nuance that people bring to why they support embryo adoption, why they participate, why they gave their embryos to recipients or why they received embryos, but also what does this mean at a bigger scale, even if it's not on people's radar or hearts and minds like participation in this project is directly linked materially, politically and rhetorically to very ambitious political agendas that are absolutist and extreme, directing democracy toward authoritarianism and trying to realize a Christian nationalist vision for the United States, and it is alarming on many levels, and I don't think even the do-gooders of embryo adoption are off the hook and um from affiliating with this bigger, broader and more consequential project you know you articulated it beautifully, but it would be good perhaps to sort of draw that line a little bit.
Speaker 1:uh, maybe for people who are unfamiliar with this politics of yeah, what that connection to between the embryo adoption project and anti-abortion politics, and then, I guess, christian nationalism and these broader themes Like I know you know I'm just thinking for myself.
Speaker 1:I'm going to be having to lecture to undergraduates in a couple of weeks and talking a bit about Judith Butler and gender. You know connection between gender and the rise of authoritarianism and I already know that some students will just be like you know what are you talking about. What's the connection between gender and these authoritarian politics? It's, you know you're making things up. I hope our listeners are a little more charitable and inquisitive than that. But yeah, this link between the embryo adoption and anti-abortion politics and then the broader movement as well.
Speaker 3:Thanks. Movement as well, thanks. Yeah, that's an. That's an important thrust behind why I wrote this book, which is one to address a novel site for social life and activity and give it ethnographic attention that has not yet been given. It's the first book on the practice and movement of embryo adoption in the us context, um, but really my hope is to start connecting the dots in some big ways and to think with nuance about what those connections mean. So one thing I'll say is I'm also very excited to teach Judith Butler's work. Who's Afraid of Gender? I teach gender every semester with great delight to undergraduates who have no idea what's coming.
Speaker 3:But thinking with how something so every day, such as how one identifies or how one's been assigned and operating within constraining conditions, might be connected to much bigger political, older, broader and bigger political issues. So embryo adoption might be a very niche social practice that attracts a few thousand people. You know to date there's about 2,500 children that have been born. We're not talking, you know, massive amounts of participants. Its connection to anti-abortion politics is myriad and there's some ways in which it's both explicit and others it's prominently implicit and I think that's by design. So, um, embryo adoption, rhetorically and in practice has been treated as the counterpart to abortion. So, rhetorically and practically, it is treated as promoting a culture of life, which is the counterpart to how abortion is framed from opponents of it. It is treated as righting a social wrong which abortion is treated as sort of like wronging what should be a social right. It is holding professionals accountable In this case it's the fertility industry for overproducing and undervaluing embryos. It's the fertility industry for overproducing and undervaluing embryos. So on a lot of discursive levels, rhetorical, sort of promotional levels, embryo adoption is the thing to get behind that promotes the same idea, which is that embryos and fetuses, no matter where they're located and this is the language now in the era, post-ivf era it's no matter where they're located, embryos and fetuses are persons deserving of rights and protections accorded and due to all persons. And so this used to be a very fringe idea in the US anti-abortion movement.
Speaker 3:Once Roe v Wade was ruled on in January of 1973, one of the first efforts that happened in Congress was try to amend the US Constitution with a human life amendment to say persons, according to the 14th Amendment, include the unborn. It was a real big question posed during the deliberations, the arguments during Roe v Wade. When the Supreme Court heard our argument, the question came up of like well, if fetuses are regarded as persons, would abortion rights be legal? And the court conceded it would essentially be a legal Achilles heel. It would be a problem If fetuses were legal persons. Then we actually have a problem, and so it inspired effort to do what is an absolutist move, which is to redefine the legal definition of personhood in the US Constitution as including fetuses in utero. That effort was unsuccessful every single time it had tried to play out. It also was not the mainstream strategy. As years developed, as evangelicals got on board come the mid-1980s and strategies began to codify, there was a more of an incrementalist or erosionary approach, which sought to pass laws like parental notification requirements and mandatory waiting periods and only ambulatory surgery centers can provide abortion care that have certain width of doors that can accommodate gurneys and things like this. That was the mainstream strategy to erode, erode, erode because abortion remained very popular and continued to win, which continues to be true now that Roe v Wade has been overruled and we live in the era of Dobbs, where essentially the power to decide has gone back to the states. I live in a state that was the first to ban abortion following Dobbs, and there's about 14 other states that have outright banned abortion, about 26 that have severely restricted it. So this is where we're living right now in the US context. So this is where we're living right now in the US context.
Speaker 3:Embryo adoption is linked to this because, well one, the first family forged through embryo adoption, filed an amicus brief in the Dobbs ruling along with 80 other supporters of the Mississippi Gestational Ban Act but sort of like the pro-life position saying that, you know, supreme Court, viability isn't at 15 weeks, which is what the Mississippi gestational age ban was being debated over, not 15. It's actually fertilization. Our daughter is living proof of that. She, hannah, was born from an embryo. She's the first orphaned, frozen embryo and if the Supreme Court wanted to do it right, they would recognize that personhood begins at fertilization, ie, conception, ie, no matter where they're located, at the earliest stage of human development. And this was not acknowledged in the majority ruling and has not. The Supreme Court has not yet picked up cases explicitly, explicitly about personhood to include embryos and fetuses at any stage of development and any location and any location.
Speaker 3:This is the abolition movement to sort of like, draw very explicitly on racialized ideas of like, likening embryos to formerly enslaved Americans and likening anti-abortion advocates to white abolitionists, seeking to embrace and enroll some of the important momentum of civil rights and racial justice movements for anti-abortion ends. Of course that's appropriative and disingenuous because restrictions on reproductive freedom are infringements on racial justice and vice versa. So they're completely disingenuous in embracing the language and rhetoric of racial justice. But it's a super common strategy among the US religious right. For example, they call personhood the North Star of the anti-abortion movement. Well, the North Star is the name of the Gazette by Frederick Douglass, who was a black abolitionist who is decrying slavery, racialized, classed and gendered category that has excluded all but white Anglo-Saxon Christian landowning men from inclusion and has had to incrementally expand to include women, people of color, migrants et cetera into that category unlanded people. So that's a direct connection.
Speaker 3:The abortion has served as a keystone for religious right, right wing, conservative politics for many, many, many years, essentially since the religious right organized under Reagan's election in 1980. There's a motley crew of political allies who said this we would be do well, fiscal conservatives and religious conservatives to come together and try to create a political block that has power. Abortion became the keystone issue. It was manufactured issue and it's propelled their political issues for a long time.
Speaker 3:With the overturning of Roe what's been sort of come to light is that it's not a winning issue, at least popularly or electorally. They keep losing. At every chance voters get the chance to say weigh in on abortion, everyone says give it back or defend it. So what they're trying to do is to circumvent what's a fairly democratic legislative process, either through these like referendums at the state level or via legislation through state houses or US legislative houses, by going through the courts. So the agenda is to stack the Supreme Court they've done that with an ultra conservative majority and then to put before the court to team up for cases where they can codify extremist agendas. We're already seeing the court do exactly this.
Speaker 3:And reproductive rights are useful organizing strategy for these issues. But some of the same parts of those playbooks are being applied to, let's say, gender-affirming care. So trans youth are bearing the brunt of this. My state is one that passed a bill banning gender affirming care for trans and non-binary youth. The same savior strategies were applied in this context to talk about risk and vulnerability and protectionism. So recognizing the saviorist political strategy has been useful for anti-abortion politics. It's been useful for advancing the idea of embryo personhood. It's been extremely useful for advancing the narrative of Christian nationalism more generally, which is the US.
Speaker 3:The white Christian American in the United States is a figure of valued vulnerability.
Speaker 3:Threats to that are feminism, multiculturalism, globalism, migration, critical race theory, gender ideology and, frankly, higher education, anthropology for sure, is on the chopping block.
Speaker 3:The governor of Florida has said anthropology is a useless, useless degree and major, and is seeking to defund anything resembling education that teaches about diversity, equity or inclusion.
Speaker 3:So Texas, indiana, number of States are on that bandwagon, but those are all being cast as threats to a a farce, frankly, a figure of US political power that is organized around whiteness, that's organized around wealth and a particular family formation that is not representative of most families in the United States, but as a nuclear family with gender asymmetries that is submissive to authoritative power, both the authoritative power of the divine power of God, but also to law and order as directed by government officials.
Speaker 3:So the receptivity to authoritarian politics is very consistent with christian nationalist rhetoric and, unfortunately, is not consistent with christian theology. So it's, these are very putatively christian ideals and ideas, but um, they're not consistent with what many people of faith, recognize as Christ's teachings are, the call of the golden rule or any of the sentiments that are taught through, which has always been about, as I say feed the hungry, clothe the poor, care for the least among us. That is not what Christian nationalism is purporting to do, and we see this really explicitly with I don't know a corporate mogul and Trump and sort of like in bed with tech fascist JD Vance, as the representatives for the Republican Party in this year's federal election.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. That's a great place to end it and obviously, well, I've got like about 100 more questions That'd be great to have further conversations and, yeah, thank you so much for your work and also, yeah, acknowledging, as you sort of mentioned, the coming election and the difficulty of you know and the importance of voicing criticism in this environment, both within the university context and certainly outside it. So, thank you very much.
Speaker 3:Thanks for the opportunity to share. It's been a real honor. Yeah, this is not a drill If you're a US American voter. This is the election of our lives pause.
Speaker 2:Why don't you turn on the recording on the zoom as well, chris? Sorry, resa, because I just muted and then very noisily cleared my throat and then realized I was doing that into audacity rather than um muting myself. Excuse me, thank you. Thanks for watching.